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Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
So John, welcome to the show.
Thank you for being here.
Could you give us a top level view about what it is that you're working on right now and
your journey so far?
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks so much for having me, Akio.
Looking forward to the conversation.
ah What am I working on right now?
Essentially, Talent Mapper is...
at uh a period where we are really looking at um kind of growing our customer base.
So I'm really focused on expanding the amount of customers that we're working with, but I
want to do so in a relatively targeted way.
So we've actually just stripped back the way that we are going about our marketing and our
targeting to focus on a single segment, which I'm sure we'll kind of dig into a little bit
later.
uh How did I get here?
Well, uh,
your listeners will probably have spotted the accent.
I'm sat here in our offices in London, but I obviously don't sound like it, so I'm
originally from the US.
But I moved to the UK about eight years ago.
Came over got my master's degree and then went straight into the world of management
consulting I specialized in strategic HR worked with about 90 clients on everything from
you know footsie 100 executive pay packages to Broad-based reward and talent strategies
for multinationals around the world um really really exciting world of consulting learned
an unbelievable amount, but
Also probably learned about myself that maybe the big multinational organizational
corporate structure wasn't where I was built to thrive.
So since leaving the world of consulting, I spun out into the world of startups and I've
been in different roles across a number of startups, primarily in EdTech and HR tech uh in
commercial roles of ever increasing seniority, which is how I've
landed here at TalentMapper as the Chief Commercial Officer.
Amazing.
mean, you know, quite a journey, right?
And I'd love to dig in firstly with you transitioning out of a big corporate setting and
getting into the world of startups, because it's quite funny.
My story is quite similar as well, right?
Where initially I was in a big corporate setting, a big corporation, 30,000 employees or
whatever it was.
And after a year, I was like, this sucks, this is terrible.
And so I had get going into the startup world as well.
So I love to hear, know, why did you want to make that switch and what pushed you to do
that?
and then, know, if there's any lessons there, cause I think a lot of people in the
corporate sector, they do actually think this way as well, where they're like, do you what
this, you know, my work isn't really meaning so much and they can feel it, but they don't
really know what maybe the other option is.
So I'd love to hear it from you, know, what, what you found.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, you know, exactly as you said, it deeply resonates with me in a couple of
ways.
The first things first, I think for me, I'm really values driven and I've learned more and
more what that has meant to me over the last decade or so and what it means for me to be
excited about work and aligned to who I feel like I am as a person at work and at home.
And there are definitely projects as a management consultant where I was like, this
is aligned to my values.
Like we're setting up talent strategy.
It's all about helping people achieve potential and do what they need to do to progress
through their career.
I really love those projects.
Unfortunately, those projects were few and far between.
uh A lot of the other projects that I was working on were...
building out executive pay, executive remuneration strategies.
you know, in that world, one of two things happens.
You get hired by the board to ensure that they are doing the right thing from a governance
point of view in the way that they're paying the executive management, or you get hired by
management to try to maximize the salaries and the long-term bonuses that they are about
to present to the board.
And so essentially...
so much of work that I was doing, while it was intellectually stimulating and really,
really interesting, I walked out of a boardroom and was like, okay, well I just made those
two relatively rich, relatively old white males a bit richer.
And that's what I did with my day today.
And it really just, I didn't get the buzz from it, you know what mean?
So I found that really challenging, especially as time went on and...
And that matched to I'm in a bit corporate and if I want to progress, I have to...
just line up with their performance system.
And that means that I've started and two years later I can be promoted and 18 months after
that I can be promoted and 18 months after that alongside all of my peers who joined at
the same time.
It really had very little to do with the output or what we were doing or our skill sets.
It was really just, no, that's the process and so that's what we do.
uh
and I learned that process is not an area of strength for me.
And I was always trying to break the mold, which I think butted heads with a lot of
leadership.
uh And it was making me unhappy, it was making them unhappy, and it was just like a
workspace that wasn't going to work.
And so when the opportunity presented itself to spin out and say, hey, we're a brand new
business, we're four people, you would be number five, we have no processes, we have...
very little knowledge about what comes next or where we're headed, but if you're creative
and resilient, we'd like you to help take us there.
And like, now that sounds like something I can get behind, and so that's why I made the
switch.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
you know, it's interesting, right?
When your work actually means something and you can actually see the results.
I don't want say that means something because I think everyone's work does mean something,
but you know, when you actually see the tangible effects and results of that, I'm new, for
example, with the work that I do with clients, you know, when we, you know, build a
strategy or whatever it is, and they can see, you know, the night and day difference,
right?
And we can actually grow their business that the impact is massive, right?
And you have the same thing when you're working in a startup within that startup itself is
you can.
create those foundational processes and, you know, hire those, you know, team members that
are then starting to scale the company.
Then you see it go from maybe head count of five to 10 to 15.
You're seeing this like this baby grow essentially, which is a, which is a really cool
feeling, right?
And it makes you really excited for, for work every single, every single week.
You don't really dread on a Sunday night, you know, that you've got to work the next day
because you're excited about it and it's stuff you want to work on.
And it feels a bit like a game is the way I can describe it.
Yeah.
When things are flowing, you know, you just.
playing this game every single day, building this company and doing all these things,
which is an amazing experience.
then talk to me about the, I guess, the first few startups that you started to work in
then, like what were those like and how did you find that transition as well going from a
corporate setting to then the startup world?
Yeah, think the transition was a bit strange.
So I fell victim to what everyone fell victim to at the start of 2020.
My first day at my first startup was the 16th of March, 2020.
It was the day the UK went into lockdown.
And we were an HR tech startup selling into HR.
Yep,
Guess whose budget went first?
ah So it was a really rocky start.
I mean, I remember my second day and you know, I'm an immigrant.
at that stage, I'm now a citizen here in the UK, but at that stage I needed a sponsored
visa to be here.
So it was like...
make this work or get deported.
Because yeah, I had gone through 120 applications just to get a graduate job.
I got one interview.
It was tough market.
ah And so my second day, I took a 20 % pay reduction.
It was like, you can go down to four days a week.
And I was like, I'm going to work seven days a week.
Yeah
A, what else am I going to do?
Like can't go anywhere.
But B, because I really, really needed to make it work.
And so it was a challenging transition going from the security and the comfort and the
process of a big corporate to, shit, we don't know what's going on at all internally or
externally and there's no clarity in sight.
And so it was about finding that comfort and ambiguity and doing what we need to do to
make sure that we're moving in right direction.
And luckily,
the head of business development at the business who had only started maybe six months
before me, so still relatively like new to post.
But luckily she had developed a relationship in the educational world and it like
definitely wasn't what we did but...
there were some green shoots there and it was government funded.
So it was like, okay, the money's not gonna get taken away, it's in the accounts.
So is there a way that we can maybe move towards education rather than corporate as a way
to pivot and kind of stay afloat and do what we need to do?
And so she did a great job and one of the lessons that I took away from it and have
brought forward with me in the world of startups is.
you gotta be like in lockstep with your customers and with your market.
Like if you're not having product councils and you're not having regular conversations,
regardless of how seen you are with customers, then you're not gonna get it right.
And you're travel down their own direction and there's very limited ways back once you do
that in the world of startups.
So she had developed this relationship.
I got involved in having those conversations.
I joined as head of partnerships within three months.
I was the head of product, which was again a change.
But so I was working with her on the communications with prospects.
And then I was working with, you know, in my head, a kid like just at a university ah who
had an interest in product development, but no background in it, no necessary immediate
skillset, but.
He was ambitious and he was ready to grind.
And so we were on the phone all day, every day, sitting there building, changing the whole
product to focus on the education market.
And within three months, we were able to spin up a saleable MVP and we started to generate
revenue.
We generated enough revenue to bring people back onto full salary, generate enough revenue
to start developing a market and developing real relationships.
And I think the team got engaged with it.
We had some doubts on long-term viability, but we were able to get the business into a
place where at least the five of us were comfortable that we could deliver something
valuable and we could push ahead.
So it was a weird transition, but it definitely gave me lot of lessons to take forward
with me into the future.
Definitely.
mean, yeah.
Joining just as COVID was, was kicking off is definitely, definitely a difficult one to be
honest with you.
And it's, there's so much unknown or there's a lot of unknown at the time.
And obviously that, that creates a lot of stress when you're trying to run the business,
there's unknown in the business of the unknown, just around you everywhere.
And you don't really know what to do.
Um, but it's interesting what you, what you mentioned about talking to customers because
it seems so foundational, but it is missed by literally everyone.
Um, and it's something that again, I fell into the trap to.
building what I thought the customer needed, but they didn't actually need that.
And so it just didn't work and the product didn't take off.
And so I think it's so important.
And someone put it to me or described it in a different way where you need to create
soundboards, right?
So different areas within the departments, within your client base, et cetera, building
out people that could be your soundboard.
So anytime you have an idea or just to get a pulse on the market is going directly to that
soundboard and kind of figure out what it is that you need to know.
And it's so interesting that the insights that come out of it as well, because most of
time it's very different from what you were maybe thinking as well, right?
They're all about different things.
one of the challenges that founders create businesses because they have an idea that
excites them, right?
Like that's the only reason to do it uh because being a founder is hard.
So like if you're gonna do it, it needs to be the thing that you really, really want.
And so because it's your idea and it's your baby, you press ahead with what you think is
right.
And usually,
the granule, the nugget that makes it yours is something really special and you should
pursue that.
But to grow a business, a sustainable business, not just an idea, you need to be able to
commercialize it.
And the people who are commercializing it are customers.
And so you need to build a thing that they want to buy.
Sure, there's an educational journey of...
You've always bought this and it needs to be this, which is different.
So you have to take them on that journey and you have to do your thing as a business
leader to say, this is the way forward.
But you need to meet them in the middle somewhere with it's the way forward, but it's only
so much change enough that they're willing to still pay for it.
Right?
So true.
And we've had the, again, a similar experience, right?
When we tried to create a product or service, which was, it was just so different from
what they're currently doing.
And it's like, yeah, it's a great idea, but do they want to take the plunge?
Do they want to change so much?
Probably not.
But to your point, right?
You can still have your USPs in there, right?
And your little golden nuggets, as you mentioned, but at the same time, right?
It needs to meet the customer where they are right now.
And I think that's such a, such an important insight for anyone building any type of
startup or business, uh, because it's so easy to miss it.
And I think the difficulty as maybe a founding team or a founder is in the initial stages,
right?
You get rewarded for having those ideas and insights, right?
Because you started to get a bit of growth, you know, you getting a bit traction.
So that's how you think it needs to continue.
But ultimately you get to a point where you then need to pivot into them.
As we said, right, listening to your customers and figuring out what it is that they
actually need from them.
rather than just our own ideas and insights.
Because it's so interesting how different it can be.
And that's the funny thing.
without a doubt and listening to everything with a grain of salt, right?
Like if I think about our business, we are in AI enabled talent software, right?
We're all based on skills.
I thought joining the business, I used to be a management consultant, what, eight years
ago now?
uh
Skills and HR were all the rage.
Everyone was talking about skills, skills of the future, skills of the future, future of
skills, future of automation, automation of tasks, not jobs.
It's all skills-based.
It's like, awesome.
So is this skills business too late on the trend because we've been talking about it for a
decade?
No, because still only about one in 20 businesses have implemented any kind of skills
first.
Technology, anytime, skills first, HR management strategies.
We've been talking about it forever, but nobody's doing it.
And so when you listen to customers, you need to say, okay, well we're talking about
skills, but what's actually going on?
And what's the step change that we can get you to leap onto where we can help bring you
forward without disrupting everything that you've worked to build.
Because people care about the work that they do, right?
I don't want to ruin that.
I want to improve it, but you have to build something that can show them the incremental
improvements, even if it is a really radical shift in the way that we think about this.
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely.
Definitely.
I think this leads quite nicely into, you know, the company that you're building right
now.
So I love to get an understanding of what is that you guys are trying to solve, the big
problem you're trying to solve just for everyone's context.
And then also what the plans are on how you're solving that as well.
Cool, yeah.
So I like to think about our business in two parts when it comes to the problem that we're
trying to solve.
And that's because we've got two really important stakeholders that we work with.
So first things first, if I think about our buyer.
We sell into corporate HR.
and essentially what we're trying to do is A, move HR into the 21st century, ah but B,
give HR and talent professionals greater visibility into the capabilities of their
organization.
So right now, you've got a bunch of people in jobs and you know who people are, and that's
great because it can help you move people forward, but you're still spending tons of money
on external recruitment.
You're still operating primarily on intuition.
And if you're succession planning for critical roles and trying to build out a long-term
sustainable strategy, you're guessing.
What we do is we use AI and an algorithm that we've built, proprietary algorithm built on
675 million career histories.
that absorbs all of the HR data and spits out role by role the skills required to achieve
that role, and then absorbs an individual's CV or LinkedIn profile and spits out all the
skills that that individual has.
We can then, on an organizational level, on a workforce level, say here are all of the
skills that your workforce needs, and here are all of the skills that your workforce has.
m
Where are the gaps?
Where are you over skilled?
Where are you deficient in the skills that you have?
And how do we enable you as a business leader to make the most commercially people first
strategy possible?
And so that's what we do for HR.
However, our founder, Martin Mason is brilliant.
He's an idealist.
Most founders are.
ah He built the system to serve the end user, the people.
because really the mission behind TalentMapper is to make everybody's lives at work
better.
And so with all of that skills knowledge, with all of the understanding of the job and the
person,
we enable every individual employee to build a career path within the organization.
Not just, I'm an account manager, so my next step is senior account manager, and then I'm
gonna be an account director, and then, you know, that standard growth.
We are helping articulate what a squiggly career could look like for you based on the
skills you actually have, the skills you wanna develop, and the types of jobs you want to
do in the future.
And we put that power in the hands of the employee.
to help them map that out and understand the connections they need to make, the skills
they need to develop, and how they can take those next steps within the organization.
Yeah, very cool.
And I love, I love that piece about the end user where, you said, you you, you understand
the skills that they have and then you can figure out actually where can you fit into,
into maybe different departments, different types of roles, because I think the biggest
issue, let's say, you know, people have within the corporate environment is again, it just
seems like you have the standard, the standard path.
said, right.
Account manager, senior account manager, head of accounts, whatever.
Um, but actually you can pivot and move into different opportunities, but
A lot of times you don't even know what those opportunities are because we don't have the
visibility of it.
What skills are needed?
Where do I match up all these different things?
And so I think that's a really cool development focusing on the end user itself, which is
amazing.
And it's interesting.
How do you guys balance, because you're serving and you're trying to cater to, I guess,
both these client profiles, let's say, how do you balance the work internally?
Do you focus mostly on the corporates, let's say?
Um, or how do you spend that time then building the platform for the, for the users
itself, because it's, it's, it's sometimes difficult to balance those two things.
And we find the same in our side, right.
With podcasts specifically, we have the, the host and the guests, sorry, the host of the
podcast, the actual podcast themselves.
But then we also have the guests coming onto podcasts.
Like how do we make that experience amazing?
Um, whilst also making the, the other experience amazing as well.
Yeah, that's a great question.
think for us, at the end of the day, I'm a chief commercial officer.
So for me, the top priority is business sustainability.
Are we generating revenue in a way that's going to keep the business growing so that we
can achieve the ultimate goal of making everybody's lives at work better?
If we're unsustainable, then we'll never do that.
We won't achieve the mission of doing that.
I always think customer-versed, uh which means that I'm spending a lot of time with our
customers.
I'm setting up an external product council with folks who are not my target customer, but
who are tangential to that customer.
So I sell to a head of talent or an HRD.
Outside of talent in an organization HR has lots of different lenses.
There's organizational design.
There's D &I.
There's payroll.
There's comp.
There's like all of these different things and so if I'm gonna get my product right to
deliver maximum value to the customer I need to be considering the whole HR suite not just
talent and so I'm thinking about how we build that in a way that's going to save the most
time save the most money retain the best talent
Top three things, that's all I'm doing.
But retain the best talent is the one that we really, really focus on because I can't get
that right unless we get the end user side right.
the best talent needs to want to use the system, engage with the system.
Now luckily, the best talent usually has a drive to develop, has a drive to move
themselves forward.
So they have a natural impetus to get into the system and unlock those opportunities.
So it does have this uh symbiosis to it, but...
We have to translate the way that we think about value to say someone pays our bills, they
only pay the bills if the end user is satisfied.
So how do we do that?
And can we do it in stages?
Can we break it up?
We've just changed the way the technology works where I can deliver a lot of value to HR
upfront before we give it to the workforce so that they have a better onboarding journey
and the end user gets a better experience of the system.
But the
paying for it, experiences the value add first so we're building a more sustainable
partnership and then it's about layering yourself into the strategy like I don't think of
us as a pure SaaS business where we sell you a software and then we like thanks bye we are
HR built by HR
we understand the challenges because we've lived them.
We've delivered those changes.
We've had that experience.
And so we stick around and we dig into the strategy and we try to get the outcomes.
And so we sell you a software that's going to help you, but we do wrap around support and
we have strategic knowledge about what it means to be an HR professional in a large
organization.
And so we can deliver those really, really.
um
that kind of trusted partner, trusted advisor relationships with our clients rather than,
you know, Salesforce, here's Salesforce, have a great day, you can pay us extra for the
enablement, right?
Like, that's not the model.
So it is really about making everyone's lives better and to make the end user's life
better, I have to make my client's life better.
And so we stick around and we solve that problem.
And that's the way that we dedicate our resource to those conversations.
Yeah.
I mean, it makes a lot of sense, right?
Is ultimately if there's no revenue coming into the business, how can you serve the end
user?
Right.
And so I think it's a, that's a great way to put it.
And I love to now dig into how are you growing the business?
Right.
And what you say, I don't be touching it at very start about, you know, starting to nail
down the ICP and everything, but I love to hear on your side, you know, how are you
looking to grow this thing over the next, the next few years?
Yeah, so we're at a really exciting point in our journey where we get to kind of make the
decision of how are we going to do this?
And we're an industry agnostic software.
We could do accounting or management consulting, technology, retail, construction.
We could do anything, it's fine.
The skills taxonomy that we have is 50,000 skills strong and it could reflect a wide array
of different business needs.
However...
at our stage of growth, if you target everyone, you target nobody.
Right?
You're just making noise.
Noise in the void.
ah And so I'm really trying to move us away from that into where do I believe that we can
add the most value in the most meaningful way.
And so over the next couple of months, probably the next six months or so, I'm targeting a
single industry segment.
And I'm going...
after uh UK mid-sized retailers.
Now, that choice is really deliberate and it goes back to customer and end user, right?
I want to think where can we add the most value to our bottom line, but also to our actual
mission.
Retail's got a really interesting use case.
Typically, it's a small head office function with a really widely dispersed workforce.
That dispersion creates a real challenge around visibility and crew mobility.
However, lots of retailers want to develop their people because when you're operating at
50 to 100 % turnover in employees, you're spending a hell of a lot of money replacing
people and doing that sort of stuff.
So could I get into retail?
give my small head office function way more visibility to their wider workforce, to the
skills that they have within the wider workforce, so that they can increase their
retention rates, reduce the costs, and increase their internal mobility.
That's amazing.
But at the same time, can I connect my end user, my staff, my employees back to the
business?
They want to grow.
But right now, because head office is in Leicester and I'm based in Newcastle, how do I
find that opportunity?
Mmm.
If I can give them a system to say, okay, I am a shift manager at a store.
My next step up is assistant manager of the store, but my boss is never going to leave.
Is there anything else that I could do with the skills that I have?
Maybe I want to move into e-commerce and I want to move head office and I want to be on
the digital side.
Maybe I actually, the thing that I love about shift management is the organization of the
rotas and I love the numbers and I love playing around and solving the puzzles.
Maybe I should move into finance.
because I've got the perfect skills for that.
It's how do we unlock that visibility for both sides to add value to the client and unlock
career mobility for the individual staff.
So we are looking at retail.
That is the near-term strategy, and so we're getting ourselves in all the rooms and all
the digital spaces that we can to work with those retailers, as well as our clients are
Dunelm and Mountainwear.
How are we building up case studies that matter both to the client and to the people?
Yeah.
I mean, amazing.
think it's, makes so much sense.
And I worked in retail back when I was like 17, 18, and the amount of staff turnover they
have is just incredible.
Right.
And you're so, you're so right in saying that head office and the stores themselves are so
separate that, know, when you're working the sort, you don't even think of the potential
that you have moving up the company and head office or whatever that could be, even though
there could be some amazing, um, roles and potential there as well.
And so, um, so I think it's a great.
ICP to go into for sure, with a lot of opportunity as well, because, you know, if you even
if you can cut down their staff turnover by X percentage, it's, it's incredible what they
would save and make more as well.
I did the maths.
okay, so here are the numbers, here are the assumptions we're making, right?
So, UK retail, uh on average, even to replace a store worker, the loss of productivity and
the cost of recruitment, all told, costs about 15,000 pounds.
Wow.
It's really expensive, um even at minimum wage or living wage employment.
It's very expensive.
Just because if you don't have someone on the shop floor, you're losing productivity every
minute that they're not on the shop floor.
You're losing money.
Right?
So uh the productivity losses is huge.
Let's call it 15 grand per employee.
We start working with organizations around 250 headcount.
If I reduced your turnover rate by 1%.
from a 25 % turnover.
Let's say I'm saving you three employees a year.
That's already 45,000 pounds of cost savings.
Just at a 1 % differential.
You expand that into some of the larger organizations that we're looking at, 1,500
headcount across the country.
We're saving you 200 grand a year.
on replacement costs, you're quadrupling the investment that you're making in our
technology in savings.
Like that.
If you get a 1 % reduction, the research shows that even just by targeting an internal
mobility strategy, spending any time focusing on it, on average you increase your
retention rate by 5%.
So, the math is there.
yeah, no, no, that's a, that's incredible.
And I think it's, yeah, it's such a great ICP and it makes so much sense from a, from a
go-to-market standpoint is, when you do try to speak to everyone, you do speak to no one
and it's just the way it is.
And that's something that we've, uh, we've been struggling with a little bit ourselves as
well, the last couple of years, because, you we can, we can serve so many different
industries, so many different types of businesses.
It's like, well, who do we go after?
What's our niche?
What's our, you know, our ICP there.
And so, I mean, that's something that we're still trying to figure out ourselves on, you
which markets and industries make the most sense for us.
But it sounds to me like, you know, that ICP there makes so much sense.
And the cool thing is that once you've kind of, you know, landed in that industry, then
there's obviously adjacent industries that you can then start pivoting into, right?
And you start spreading out that way.
And so I think the potential there is going to be, it's going to be incredible, to be
honest.
It's going to be very cool to see.
Yeah, I hope so.
And that's where, again, that HR background comes into play, right?
Because we are able to recognize the organizational design, the organizational structure
of retail mimics hospitality.
It mimics construction.
It mimics utilities.
Small head office, large disparate workforce.
We have natural dominoes that we can tackle after we create enough noise in this market.
uh And yeah, the best part about it is
we can make a lot of noise in a way that's achieving the mission, not just generating
revenue, which I think is really important.
definitely.
So one of the interesting changes that's obviously happened in the last few years is AI
and the implementation of all these technologies and everything.
So it'll be, it'll be curious to learn how are you guys leveraging AI in the, in the
go-to-market play, right?
In the business growth side of things.
Cause I know in the product that you have AI enablement already built into it and
everything, but from a, from the internal use of AI, like how, how are you guys using it
and what you seeing in this film?
Yeah, I think it's all about removing the kind of arduous tasks, right?
Removing the tasks that used to take hours and hours and hours of manpower and just
simplifying and stripping out.
even when it comes to simple stuff like designing of decks, we've got templates.
Do I need a salesperson to go through and update that with new information every time?
Or can I whack that through AI and just say, make these three changes to these three
spots, bing, bang.
And I've got that done in 30 seconds rather than 20 minutes, right?
So it's incremental uh shifts.
We're definitely not going the full AI Legion route.
um
I don't believe in it particularly for, especially for a business of our size.
If you're a massive, you know, SaaS platform and you're around for ages and everyone knows
your name and it really is a volume play, go for it.
An AI agent that does kind of B2B outbound probably makes sense for you.
With where we are in our growth journey.
We are account-based marketing.
We need to be specific and detailed and trusted advisor experts in these conversations.
so AI doesn't necessarily help us with the attraction of the conversation.
What it helps us with enormously is understanding the market landscape.
So we're using AI to aggregate information on every different HR challenge that we think
we can solve.
Who's experiencing those challenges?
Because AI is great at finding those articles, finding that information, finding those
different touch points.
Who is signaling intent?
Can we search for quick search on chat GPT and find who has replaced a CEO or replaced an
HRD or uh is looking at layoffs or is doing any of these different things, redundancies?
We can find that information very, very quickly, aggregate it, and then begin to unpick.
Hmm.
Do we have something that serves that need?
How do we build an account plan around that target market, right?
ah So I would say we're not looking at AI at scale right now.
What we're doing is simplifying the tasks that make us successful in an account-based
marketing style.
So really trying to leverage the technology to save time rather than maximize output.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And it's so interesting is, especially in the B2B space is it really is about building
genuine relationships with people, right?
Especially like high ticket, high ticket services, et cetera.
It is all just relationship based.
And so it's interesting.
A lot of companies looking to completely outsource it to AI, you know, like how are you
going to build those genuine relationships, right?
From an AI to, to, your potential client customer.
Um, doesn't quite compute for me as well.
So I agree.
I don't think that is the move right now, but as you know, to your point, there are
definitely workflows and processes where if you start adding in AI, it just increases
efficiency massively.
Um, I mean, for us, you know, we're using AI every single day and a lot of our workflows.
But the main thing that we've added in is coming to human touch points throughout the
workloads.
It's so important to have that you can't have from like the end to end process of just
complete AI.
There needs to be checkpoints throughout that process.
to, to check what's been done and to, maybe change it, modify, et cetera.
Um, but that's definitely been a, you know, something that popped up for us because we try
to, we try to completely AI, AI uh our workflows before and, and it didn't quite work.
So we had to, you know, kind of think about it in a different way.
And I think AI supported workflows is definitely the move right now.
Um, and the research is what you said.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, like, we work with an HR, right?
AI's scary.
Because we're making people decisions.
We're making decisions that massively impact people's lives.
To go full AI and remove the human element, like I think I posted relatively recently
about how we must preserve the human element of human resources.
It has to be there because context is everything.
And if there's one thing that AI is awful at, it's understanding context.
So like we have to be cautious in the way that we leverage AI.
We want it to increase operational
We want to enable our work to be improved and delivered quicker, but we never implement AI
in a decision process.
That needs to be human-led.
It needs to be done in partnership, particularly with clients.
uh And so we are conscious of using AI to automate tasks, but keeping decisions to humans.
Yes, yeah, no, think that's that's a great way to put it for sure and Yeah, that's that's
amazing.
So one of the one of the final questions we always ask guests in the show is If you can go
back to your 18 year old self and only take three lessons with you whether it's some
business knowledge philosophical knowledge Just anything what those three lessons be and
and why would it be those things?
Yeah, cool.
So I'm gonna start with one that I actually gave this advice today, because it's my
favorite little piece of advice.
So I think whoever told people to turn strengths into, or turn weaknesses into strengths
was absolutely insane.
I think that's terrible advice.
We all have natural strengths.
It makes us who we are.
It makes us exceptional in the things that we do.
Instead of turning weaknesses into strengths, turn weaknesses into competencies.
Make sure they don't hold you back, then identify your strengths and do everything in your
power to maximize them.
They are what makes you special.
They are how you will progress.
And they are the things that you should lean into because you'll be way happier and you'll
probably be a lot more successful as long as you mitigate the risks of your weaknesses.
So that's number one.
I spent way too much time early in my career trying to build out my data analytics skills
because data was the future.
And I'm like, I'm not that guy.
I'm a people person.
Put me out in the market.
That's where I need to be.
So I would take that back with me.
um
Also, I was in Finland last week for the Nordic Business Forum and I heard Simon Sinek
speak.
And obviously his book, Start With Why, really really pressured.
But one of the things that he said stood out to me really really deeply.
He said, I am the best example of having a plan does not work out.
uh He was like, nothing.
that he has done was in the plan.
And so I think, especially for me when I was 18, it was very straightforward.
University, excellent performance at uni, three internships, into management consulting,
partner by 35, whatever it is.
That was the plan.
I would have been miserable.
But even...
Knowing that I've spun off that plan.
I spent so much time especially in my you know mid-20s holding myself accountable to a
plan that would have made me miserable and that Made me miserable oh even just trying to
match myself to that.
So I would say you know have broad strokes but Holding yourself accountable to a plan
It might hold you back.
So be cautious of planning, would say, is piece of advice number two.
Piece of advice number three is probably...
build relationships over chasing ambition.
I'm still very ambitious.
I'm 31, I still consider myself at the start of my career.
I believe that I have a lot to achieve.
If I focus solely on the ambition, I'll never get anywhere because the only reason I'm
here is because the people who have helped me along the way and the relationships that
I've been able to build.
Always going in with a, how can I help you first type of mindset?
And I think had I let go of the focus on ambition a little bit earlier and focused on how
do I help people and how do I make their lives better?
uh I might be even further than I am now.
yeah, balancing ambition and relationships.
Yeah, amazing, amazing.
Well, thank you so much for sharing all this and joining me on today's show.
I've loved this conversation.
I found it very exciting and everything.
hopefully everyone else has as well.
And there's a lot of golden nuggets for everyone to take away from this.
So yeah, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure, it was a delight to be here and yet I found it quite exciting as well.
thanks for having me on.
Of course.
Thank you very much.